She nodded, dumbfounded. “Are you sure?”
Big big eyes.
“Information is power,” he had declared over breakfast eggs and sausage.
“How can we make money out of this?”
“That’s easy,” Fia said. “Boy-love.” Mr. Peach scrambled eggs, unperturbed. For two months now A World Somewhere had been working up to a culminating moment of passion and oral between Raimundo and Ronaldão. If Edson ever bothered to watch the television read mags follow the chat channels, he would have known that the most important question in Brasil was will they/won’t they? The bookies’ odds were dropping day by day as the Notorious Episode approached: it surely must happen: boy-love on prime time. As part of the buildup the writers had been holed up in a hotel under armed guard. Expectation was sky-high, advertising prices cosmological.
But Fia had already watched that ep.
It was a complicated bet; small amounts liquidated from antiques donated by Mr. Peach spread around backstreet bookies all over northern São Paulo, never enough to shift the odds, sufficiently far apart to break up a pattern. Edson, Fia, and Mr. Peach cruised the boulevards, swinging coolly into the back-alley rooms and slapping the reis down on the Formica table.
Edson was so engrossed sending the black feathers and the pichaçeiros with the cockerel stencils out into Cidade de Luz to summon the old team that he completely missed the Notorious Episode.
Old Gear summoned his safe out of the floor and fetched sufficient reis to bathe in.
“How did you know they’d chicken out at the last moment? Were you holding a scriptwriter’s mother hostage or something?”
“Or something,” Edson said.
And standing up in front of the old Penas in Emerson’s gym, sports-bags full of reis under the desk, Edson had watched the years scatter like startled birds. He was twelve again, and with the rolling back of hope and achievement came the bitter realization that for all his ambition he had never been able to fly fast enough to escape Cidade de Luz’s gravity. You end as just another malandro with a gun and a gang.
“Thank you all for coming. I have a plan, an operation. I can’t achieve it myself; I need your help. It’s not legal” — laughs here: As if, Edson — “and it’s not safe. That’s why I wouldn’t ask you as friends, even as old Penas. Don’t think I’m insulting anyone’s honor when I offer to pay you, and I’ll pay well. I had a bit of a windfall. A couple of bets came in. You know me; I will always be professional.” He takes a breath and the room holds its breath with him. “It’s a big ask, but this is what I want to do … ”
“I see no political objections to you planning an operation,” says The Man, leaning into the heat so that the sweat drips from his nipples. “Edson, I respect your businesslike attitude, so I’m offering you fifteen percent off the standard license fee.”
Edson realizes he’s been holding his breath. He lets it out so slowly, so imperceptibly, that the sweat-beads on his thin chest do not even shiver.
“It’s a generous offer, senhor, but at the moment, any monetary fee hits my cash flow hard.”
The Man laughs. Every part of him jigs in sympathy. “Let’s hear your payment plan, then.”
Edson nods at Milena, still keeping it up, still smiling at every bounce.
“You said she was impressive.”
“I said she needed surgery.”
“I’ve got her a try-out with Atletico Sorocaba.” It’s not quite a lie. He knows the first name of the man there; he’s left an appointment with the secretary.
“Not exactly São Paulo.”
“It’s building a following. I’ve a career development plan.”
“No one could ever accuse you of not being thorough,” The Man says. “But…”
“I’ll throw in my fut-volley crew.”
The Man scowls. The SurfTeam copies his expression, amplified by hard. “They’re girls.”
The Man rolls his head on his sloping, corrugated neck.
“They do it topless.”
“Deal,” says The Man, suddenly quivering with laughter, rocking back and forth, creasing his big hairy belly, slapping his thigh. “You kill me, you fucking cheeky ape. You have your license. Now, tell me, what do you want it for?”
“Very well, senhor, with your permission I am going to break into the military police vehicle pound at Guapira and steal four quantum computers.”
OCTOBER 29, 1732
Some Notes on the Hydrography of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco
By
Dr. Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon:
Fellow of the Royal Academy of France
The Rio Negro, or “Black” River is one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon, joining with the Rio Solimoes some two hundred and fifty leagues from the Amazon’s mouth, three leagues beneath the settlement of São José Tarumás, named after the nowextinct tribal Tarumá, or São José do Rio Negro. The most striking characteristic of the Rio Negro is that from which it derives its name — its black waters. And this is no imaginative or fanciful appellation; forasmuch as the waters of the ocean are blue, those of this river are jet black. The Rio Branco, a tributary of the greater Negro, is, as its name suggests, a “white” river. Rivers in greater Amazonia are of these types, “black water” and “white water.” Beneath the Rio Branco all the northern tributaries of the Rio Negro are black water-those to the south are cross-channels connecting with the Solimões.
From the Arquipelaga Anavilhanas I proceeded to this more promising camp at the confluence of Black and White Rivers where I have undertaken a series of tests of the waters and substrata of the two rivers. Both rivers are exceptionally deep and show a distinct stratification in the species of fish that live there. However lead-line soundings from the Rio Negro show a dark sediment, rich in vegetable matter, in its bed while the Rio Branco’s is soft, inorganic sift. An immediate speculation is that both rivers rise over differing terrains: the Rio Branco being hydrologically similar to the Rio Solimões which rises in the Andes cordillera, it seems a reasonable conclusion to draw that it too rises in a highland region, as yet uncharted but in all likelihood situate in the vast extent of land between the Guianas and the viceroyalty of Venezuela …
Dr. Robert Falcon set down his quill. The voice of the forest deceived; many times in river camps he had thought he heard his name called or a disstant hallo, only, on closer listening that verged on a hunter’s concentration, to perceive it as a phrase of birdsong or the rattle of some minute amphibian, its voice vastly greater than its bulk. Again: and this was no bird flute or frog chirp. A human voice calling in the lingua geral that his porters and paddlers, from many different tribes, used among themselves. A canoe in the stream. What should be so strange about that in these waters to set his men a-crying?
Falcon carefully sanded and blew dry his book. His gauze canopy, only partially successful against the plaguing insects, was set up just within the tree line. A dozen steps took him down onto the cracked, oozing shore, the river still falling despite the recent violent thunder squalls. Never had he known rain like it, but it was still a drop in the immense volume of the Amazon rivers.
His men were arrayed on the shore. The object of their attention was a solitary canoe, a big dugout for war or trade, drifting on the flow. Falcon slid on his green glasses for better discrimination, but the range was too great. He turned his pocket-glass on it; a moment to focus, then the canoe leaped clear. An immensely powerful black man sat in the stern, steering a coutse to shore. Falcon knew that form, that set of determination: Zemba, the freed slave Luis Quinn had taken into his mission up the Rio Branco.